Beating heart cells created in 11 days
8 Apr 2011 by Evoluted New Media
Adult skin cells have been converted directly into beating heart cells in just 11 days in a new technique that bypasses the need to generate embryonic-like stem cells
Adult skin cells have been converted directly into beating heart cells in just 11 days in a new technique that bypasses the need to generate embryonic-like stem cells
|
Scripps Research scientists have created mature heart muscle cells directly from skin cells |
The technology could be used to treat a range of diseases and injuries involving cells loss or damage – like heart disease and Parkinson’s – but still requires tweaking to eradicate the risk of cancer.
The new technique involves reprogramming adult human cells back to a pluripotent state where they can divide and change into any cell type. It employs four genes used by Japanese scientists in 2006 to make induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. However, scientists at the Scripps Research Institute switched off the genes’ activity after a few days – before they developed into iPS cells – and coaxed them to turn into heart cells.
“In 11 days, we went from skin cells to beating heart cells in a dish. It was phenomenal to see,” said Sheng Ding, study leader.
Ding said giving the cells a different kind of signal could turn them into brain cells or pancreatic cells.
“This work represents a new paradigm in stem cell reprogramming,” Ding said. “We hope it helps overcome major safety and other technical hurdles currently associated with some types of stem cell therapies.”
Using currently employed techniques, it takes between two and four weeks to create iPS cells from skin cells, and only one cell out of thousands make the complete transformation. Giving a mixture of the desired cells plus the iPS cells could be dangerous – when injected in mice, the mixture causes cancer-like growths.
The four genes used to create iPS cells have also been linked to the development of cancer, so Ding and his colleagues are working on a new technique to develop iPS cells without the use of these genes.
